The Half That You See

by Rebecca Rowland

  A wave of nausea spread outward from his stomach and manifested in his mouth as saliva. He closed his eyes and let his stomach settle, focusing on something other than his body rejecting the medication. The doctor said that he would get used to the meds, but the side effects never seemed to fade away into the background static of daily life.

  When he finally reached the body, he saw that she was naked, gray, and caught in the roots of strangler fig. Her head hung, chin on her bare chest. Her gray skin was blotchy in some areas and dirty. Scrapes formed whip marks across her legs. Her face was bloated, her thin lips cracked like dried clay. Spanish moss, almost indistinguishable from her grimy hair, framed her face.

  He walked around her, careful of where he stepped, old habits resurrected.

  He found a tree tattooed on her back. Denuded branches stretched outward from shoulder to shoulder. The trunk extended downward along her spine. The ink was still black, not yet faded green with time, but not new enough for the skin to be puffy and red, a sign of the body’s reaction to the ink.

  A tree of life on dead flesh.

  He shook off the goose bumps. It didn’t make sense how preserved she was. No bugs, no gnaw marks. Everything he would normally look for in a crime scene. Maybe she had been on drugs, stripping off her clothes as her body overheated, running until lost, and then getting tangled in the trees.

  Seemed plausible.

  Except for the crown of roots sprouting from her head.

  It was after noon during the walk back to the house. His stomach growled. Cornelius probably missed him but didn’t bother to come find him.

  He picked the stickers from his pants before stepping up on the porch. He kicked off his muddy boots, and they landed by the door.

  Inside, Cornelius glanced up expectantly. He wasn’t sure who enjoyed retirement more, himself or his dog.

  He realized that he had stayed out there far too long. He remembered the body, but not much more about it.

  Getting old, and he felt it, rooted deep in his chest.

  The phone rang. He nearly jumped. His heart skipping beats, catching his breath in his throat.

  It rang so rarely. An old, cheap push button phone, all wires and harsh digital trill. No one called him anymore.

  He answered, and his own voice sounded thick. When was the last time he used it? He and Cornelius understood one another: they didn’t speak often.

  “Hello?” he said.

  “Detective?”

  “Retired.”

  “Yeah, about that. I’m Detective Michael Keys, Homicide.”

  He vaguely remembered Keys. New guy, very green, but eager to prove himself. Still hadn’t seen the horrors of the job, or the terrible gray areas that human beings occupy while they convinced themselves of all the good they did. A misunderstanding. I would never do that. I’m a good person.

  There were no good people. There were bad people and not bad people.

  “We could use you on a consult,” Detective Keys said, far away, an electric signal travelling through black wires from there to here.

  “Not interested,” he said, attempting to intone a dispassionate distance.

  “Look, man, this is right up your alley. No one knows this like you. Give us a couple of hours. Take a look at some evidence. A few pictures. Give us your thoughts.”

  “No.”

  Flashes of black and white crime scene photos, shades of whites and grays and blacks. Blood puddles a tarry smudge.

  He popped a pill, dry swallowed, hung up the phone.

  He walked out onto the porch. A storm rolled in on quick winds. The breeze cooled his sweaty face. Probably one of the last storms of the season. Two seasons existed in his part of Florida: rainy season and brush fire season.

  Earth’s neurons fired, and the lightning reflected off the water, illuminating the small island with a banyan that he hadn’t planted.

  The storm rumbled from far away, and only the echoes reached him.

  His bedside fan roared like a lion. He swallowed a melatonin with a drink of water that he kept at his bedside. Sometimes, he awoke at night with terrible cotton mouth, another side effect of the propranolol.

  He considered if creating three new problems for every one solved was worth it.

  He sat up, a terrible pain in his chest. Sweat poured off of him. He couldn’t remember his dream. He reached over and clicked on the light and drank the water on his night stand. The pain didn’t subside.

  He panicked. Was this a heart attack? Last time he visited the doctor’s, he was in good physical shape for his age. The pain worsened, and he wanted to stand, go to the phone, call for an ambulance.

  Or maybe he would just wander out to the lake, sit down, and wait.

  His body dumped adrenaline into his system. A warmth grew through his stomach and shot through his veins like molten lead. His arms and legs numbed. He jumped out of bed like a lithe gymnast, ran for the phone. His thick fingers punched the numbers. 9-1-1.

  “9-1-1. What is your emergency?” A woman’s voice. Older. Experienced.

  He opened his mouth, but nothing came out.

  Then, something did. Vines. Great, ropy banyan vines poured out of his mouth and down to the floor, flopping like the tentacles of a squid out of water. Rough roots stifled his screams.

  He sat up in his bed, soaked with sweat. Cornelius stood at his bedside, back stiff, his normal, floppy ears on end.

  The echo of a scream hung in the house.

  He sat on the porch, drinking his coffee. Cornelius had already gone for his morning constitutional.

  The previous night’s dream still played in his memory through a hazy filter. He rubbed at his chest where the pain began in the dream, unsure if the ache existed or was just memory.

  He traced all the dream imagery back to the previous day’s events. The vines. The fear. An article he read while on the can about a man in Russia who went to his doctor when he coughed up blood. The doctors believed he had cancer. While operating, they discovered a small fir tree growing in his lungs instead of a tumor. Plants can be found in the strangest places. They are survivors.

  His own condition manifested in strange ways, like cold spots in a room, or spirit orbs caught in photographs.

  That was the essence of his life.

  He whistled for his dog. His old friend loped out of the forest. The mist thinner today.

  Cornelius carried something in his mouth. Something clearly dead.

  When the dog made it to the porch, he noticed that Cornelius's teeth were sunk hard in a rabbit’s neck. Cornelius had given up on the armadillos years ago. But rabbits, squirrels, a small bird or large lizard—still sport for the aging retriever.

  The dog dropped the body on the porch, a gift of sorts. The dog leaned against his owner’s leg. Only an animal could make a gift of death.

  He should call in the body across the lake, but the police would come, trample the land, and ruin the landscape with yellow tape and halogen lamps.

  And he wasn’t yet sure if she was really there.

  Cornelius collapsed into a pile, yawned.

  “If we wait too long, they’ll think we did it,” he said to Cornelius, who lifted his head for a moment, then dropped it back down on his paws.

  Since the phone calls, he’d taken up talking to the dog again, exercising those old muscles.

  That morning, he walked out to the body. She seemed the same as yesterday. This surprised him: still no bugs, no animals taking their due, no decomposition.

  Her wet hair, wet from the morning mist, hung about her head like a halo. The crown, he noted, drove deeper than he initially realized. In fact, it wasn’t a crown at all, but roots fed down into holes in her skull. Someone cleanly clipped the roots about two inches above her skull. He could not tell what the plant was before being cut free.

  Roots can be destructive, he thought, cracking concrete and foundation. They can tear down buildings and bridges. It can be a slow process, but one can be assured that they
will find a way. Nothing can stop them. They find the weakness and exploit it over time. That is the strength of roots. Roots possess time and patience that mankind cannot fathom. When humans are extinct, the roots will reclaim the cities, calling them home.

  He examined again at her own tree, the one on her back. Elegant line work and shading elevated the tattoo. Splendid. Done with a deft hand.

  He spent the morning with her, thinking, wondering, maybe aloud, who she was. Why she was here. Why he remained.

  From the porch, he admired the moon, not much more than a wood shaving in the sky, reflecting on his lake. Off in the distance, beyond the small island, night enshrouded the body.

  He ignored the ringing phone. For a moment, the phone tempted him. Should he answer, tell the detective on the line about his lady of the lake?

  He didn’t move. Cornelius lay on his feet, keeping them warm. With the skies clear, and the moon light dim, he saw stars splashed out like flecks of chalk on a blackboard.

  He had taken his pill, letting the tide of warmth and static wash over him. Stars above, moon on the lake, dog at his feet. What was he looking for?

  Across the way, a darkness, a hole, where the body should be. And a thin, flickering light, hovered above the ground. He leaned forward, squinted through the dark. It wasn’t a reflection. It moved, too large to be a firefly or bug. Fire orange.

  He pushed the sleeping Cornelius off his feet, pulled on his boots, and hurried to the shed. He grabbed his machete and flashlight.

  He jogged around the lake to the body’s location. The unexpected exertion made him breathless. The light was no longer there. Maybe he imagined it.

  However, the body of the woman was gone as well.

  Through the brush, he caught a sliver of the orange light north of the lake. The shakes and sweating returned as he moved toward the light. He chopped the brush as he moved, trying to overtake the lantern, now disappearing behind trees.

  He could hardly keep up, and he assumed that the person with the lantern also carried the body of the tree girl. It didn’t make any sense.

  After some time, three more lanterns appeared as he closed in on the original light. The swinging lanterns converged on a large bonfire.

  He saw the man that he followed. A carved wooden mask hung on his face. The design feigned roots or vines, eyes mere slits, and the mouth a dark cave. He laid the body of the girl on the ground, leaning her against a tree. He stood with others, four in all, around the fire.

  He smelled the fire, heard the popping of knots in the wood. The other men also wore carved masks, flames crawling across the lacquered finishes. Grotesque, twisted faces. Faces not their own.

  One of them rang a bell. The reverberation echoed into the night. Nearby, another masked man in a thick red robe led four naked women toward the flame, their hands bound with vines before them. A man carrying a thurible followed the women. Fragrant incense now mixed with the scent of burning wood.

  The women stood in order by the size of the tree growing out of her skull, from largest to smallest. The final woman had none. A leather strap in her mouth gagged her. She trembled, but remained aware. The other women, however, wore absent gazes, glazed eyes.

  One robed man from the fire untied the treeless woman from the others and brought her before the flames. Tears stained her face with reflected fire, and she trembled, her naked flesh slicked with sweat.

  He gripped his machete’s handle, but remained frozen. He couldn’t take them all. It was an impossible situation.

  if these shadows have offended

  Whispers and shadows, all.

  One robed man held the treeless girl’s shoulders and pushed her to her knees while another held her head. The girl clamped down on the bit of leather, which stifled her pleas.

  A fellow robed man opened a wooden box and removed a large, silver hand drill. He stood above the woman, placed the bit to her head, and cranked the handle. Color drained from her, making her skin a canvas for the red and orange flames of the nearby fire. Her screams intensified with each turn of the handle. Her hair tangled around the drill bit and crawled upward toward the robed man’s hands like vine tendrils.

  She fainted during the third hole, but the other masked men supported her weight.

  The retired detective watched from behind the scrub, gritting his teeth. He could not look away.

  The robed man drilled seven holes in all. When he finished, he handed the drill to one of the others, who cleaned it and placed the drill back in the box. Another acolyte brought over a sapling growing in a large basin.

  The robed man dug with his hands and gingerly lifted it from the dirt. He shook the plant, sending a shower of loose, dark soil to the ground.

  Another man washed the roots with water from a silver decanter until the water ran clear.

  The robed man carried the tree to the woman and began to feed the root ends into the holes.

  til truth makes all things plain

  The retired detective looked down. Beside him, another machete lay in the dirt, identical to his own, but rust fully covered the blade.

  Echoes.

  He had been here before.

  Across the pond, all the women from the previous night now hung in the trees, the sun shining down on their heads, the saplings growing, rooting down. Bound cruciform, like naked grapevines in a vineyard during the winter months, they served as potting vessels.

  However, unlike the woman he found with the cropped roots, these women remained alive. He saw their movements in the strangler vines, slight, like a light wind through branches.

  Maybe it was time to report this.

  He picked up the phone on the second ring.

  He wasn’t interested, was he? Did he really want to know? To see? To feel again?

  “Hello, Detective,” Keys said.

  “Retired.”

  “We all know that the early retirement thing wasn’t fair. But that’s politics. At least you got to go out with full benefits. Better than most, I would say. An ugly affair. But IA always had it in for you. You were too high profile.”

  He grunted.

  “You really made a name for yourself, you know. The mighty and falling is what they say. How about you come look at this case.”

  “Still no.”

  “You’re not going to make this easy on me, are you?”

  “Leave me alone.”

  “You can leave the job, but the job don’t leave you.” Keys laughed. Deep, like old machines still running under the ground.

  He slammed the phone in the receiver.

  Memories took root.

  Outside, he glimpsed a hawk in a tree take flight, snatch a rattlesnake from the ground, and flap its wings to return to the skies, snake wriggling in the raptor’s grasp.

  He picked up the phone, wanting to throw it across the room. But he stopped himself. The phone cord dangled from the cradle, not plugged into the wall at all.

  His fan roared like a lion. Cornelius lay by the bedside.

  The man took a melatonin. He took a propranolol.

  The spine of a book by his bedside read Aimé Césaire Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. He flipped it open, randomly, waiting for the pills to take effect. He read the underlined words. Ending. Beginning. Germination. In the margin, in his own handwriting, he saw a scrawled note, like a child’s rhyme. He couldn’t remember writing it.

  Food for worm,

  ash from tree,

  the soul is the only

  part that is me.

  When he opened his eyes, he found himself on the island in the lake, and the roots of the large banyan had grown over him like a prison.

  No, he was rooted, toes growing as crooked roots, digging into the dirt. The banyan did not trap him; he was the banyan, rooting down, searching through dirt or silt. Finding water. His fingers clawed through the slickness searching for sustenance. His hair tangled in tendrils like Spanish moss. His pores sprouted nubs. Wind-dancing pollen on angel hairs caught the
wind and flew.

  He opened his mouth and out poured the words, and roots, and pollen.

  He wasn’t sure if anything was more real than the soil between his fingers, or the thick fog in the air.

  He pollinated. His flesh made bare. Red photosynthesis. Cells clamoring for the sun.

  And then, when the sun came out, the mist that surrounded the island wisped into nothing. So did he.

  Lonely Is the Starfish

  Lena Ng

  I have a tank full of pets. The tank measures 91.4 cm (L) by 45.7 cm (W) by 48.3 cm (H) and holds 189 liters of salt water. I keep the pH rigorously maintained at 7.8, the temperature at 25oC, and the salinity at 35 parts per 1000 units of water. There are three angelfish who like to emerge through the vegetation and poke around in the tank's corners. The jeweled moray eel pretty much keeps to itself, hiding its big head and plump body between some rocks, its bright eyes surveying its surroundings. The two azure damselfish swim leisurely back and forth.

  Although there are more interesting creatures in the aquarium, my best, most favorite pet is the starfish. It measures fifteen centimeters at its longest diameter with five stout, spiny arms. It is purple in color. It doesn’t run or beg or come when you call it, which is why I haven’t given it a name. It looks like it’s not doing anything, but if you wait patiently and look closely enough, you will see it doing lots of things. It waves its tube feet, located under its body like feet on a caterpillar, which gets it from one place to another. It taps and moves, and moves and taps, and eventually arrives where it wants to be. It can live a long time: up to thirty-five years, which is older than I am now. The starfish minds its own business, just as I mind my own. I see myself in it—slow and solitary. Living my own life, watching the drama of the tank around me.

  Over the weekend, I noticed the first of the fish disappearing. One damselfish, then another. One angelfish, then another. Happily swimming one day, vanished the next. Over a week, each night, another fish gone, until none are left in the tank.